


The Naming of Cats

by djarum99



Series: Good to be Bad - Jaguar British Villains Series [2]
Category: Jaguar "British Villains" Commercial
Genre: Brief Violence, British tailoring, Business Associates, F/M, I don't know how to tag this, Jaguar's Good to Be Bad Commercial, Not RPF, the art of villainy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-07 23:47:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1918716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/djarum99/pseuds/djarum99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: Follow up to my British-villains-good-to-be-bad-commercial fic <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1166642">Jaguar</a> – best to read it first. Mr. Hiddleston has now offered his opinions (with a tear in his eye for England, and a devastating flick of that tiny switch) on the art of British villainy, and I was once again inspired. And surprised, because several kind souls wanted more of their story. The result is here, a bit odd, and will possibly, probably, be followed by one more. Title borrowed from T.S. Eliot.</p><p>Sophie has made her choice, but the universe is throwing down tire spikes and another waltz with a moonlit devil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming of Cats

_“Someday soon, Sophie, you’ll reach a crossroads. You’ll choose a turning, right or left. Make sure you know the toll before you pay.”_

Sophie looked both ways, cut her losses, and hacked a path straight down the middle. 

She still hears his voice in London’s cryptic stray cat fog - still remembers the feel of him, the heat of his breath, his hands on her skin. She recalls wisdom delivered in a Jaguar’s front seat, his gift of her freedom from fear. In boardrooms and ball rooms and Mayfair boudoirs, she snips the filaments of financial cobwebs, catches unwary flies. She wonders if he will find her again, thinks that perhaps she might find him.

_“Listen, and remember.”_

Sophie learned the art of listening at her mother’s Chanel knees ( _hush, darling, the adults are talking_ ), and paid the devil’s price for power’s sword – her profits are amazing. She believes her backseat savior would approve, though he might raise an eyebrow (the right) at the end results of her efforts. Safe houses for women and children escaping the sex trade, commodities in the most brutal of markets. The nameless ones, their existence denied, bodies bought and sold and discarded like so much rancid meat. 

Chattel for the merciless, and Sophie is culling the assets one by one. 

She’s honest with her banker for the most part (old habits do die hard), and she’s sworn off killing, though the yen to slaughter trafficking’s shepherds snarls red at her heels each night. Raindrops in oceans, grains of sand in vast deserts - Sophie does what she can for her sins, for the angels. She’s even acquired a cat, a Maine Coon the color of Hampstead sunsets she had christened Ozymandias. He welcomes her after weeks of absence with no trace of feline resentment, and lays claim to the lonely half of her empty king-sized bed. 

_Lilac silk sheets, cream duvet_ …

The middle road suits Sophie down to England’s hallowed ground, until the day the middle road blows up in her face. 

**********

Manchester - once home to Celts, Romans, Huguenots, and Joy Division – is the site of her latest acquisition, a Victorian hospital reborn as refuge to eighty odd lost souls. Its shadowed corners reveal faces to pair with the hope her money buys, and pain, softened by the spirit of their steward. Jaimie Brewer handled mercy’s logistics, weighed in at ten stone, and had a heart as wide as his smile. 

It was the wall of pictures in crayon that siphoned Sophie’s tears, the sheer weight of what had been stolen from the artists’ battered hearts. The children had drawn themselves, hesitant scratches of pink and brown, so small in the jaws of the world. Jamie had given her a packet of tissues, the cheap scratchy kind, and offered a ride back to Ringway’s Terminal 3. He’d picked her up that morning in a dented green Peugeot, but Sophie declined – Jamie had family waiting, tea, and she needed to walk, to bathe in the tainted light of that Manchester afternoon. 

_She walked away and Jamie had waved…_

_She walked away and Jamie had waved…_ A taxi dispatcher growled ‘fifteen minutes’ in her ear, and then a splintered roar, a giant’s fist at the small of her back, the sidewalk rushing upward to bruise her knees, shred the skin of her palm. 

_She walked away and Jamie had waved…_ _Flying debris and the screaming absence of sound, gritty pavement beneath her cheek, and a flutter of burning paper that draws her eye towards horror. A hand clutching a steering wheel, the bloodied stump inches from her face, bones gleaming impossibly white. Jamie’s left, the one he’d used to wave goodbye, his wedding ring reflecting the brilliant August sun…_

_She walked away and Jamie had waved…_ Distant voices, _his hand, Jamie’s hand_ , and then she’s airborne again in someone’s arms, a man in a suit and it must be his fault, the bomb, Jaimie, and she fights, she fights, paints blood on her enemy’s shirt. He deposits her in the backseat of a waiting car, pins her between his body and cool black leather as she sobs for breath, hollow. Framed in the rear window, the Peugeot disappears in a devouring sphere of fire. Sophie’s ears ring, muting the world with death’s rattle and hum - she needs to go back, needs to put out the flames. 

_She walked away and Jamie had waved…_

“Sophie, it’s me, I’ve got you. Stop, love, hush. Stop.”

The words penetrate the swirling grit, the voice and his scent familiar. Her fingers scrabble for purchase on the arc of a cheekbone, smear her blood to mar his skin, but those eyes, his eyes, are the summer sky blue she remembers. Strong hands bind her wrists, he smiles when she stops struggling, and she remembers that, too, sharp as an assassin’s blade. 

“Tom. You… Did you do this?” _He does do this, she knows, she knows, orders death in the name of good business, kills with his own fine hands…_

“No. No,” and he draws her up against his chest, his heartbeat fast and steady. “I was simply too late to prevent it.” 

“The bomb… Why would anyone want to kill Jamie?” 

“Oh, Sophie. My wayward angel.” His lips on her eyelids, her forehead, kisses to ward off the dark. 

“They were trying to kill you.” 

**********

A private jet awaits at Ringway, his own by Sophie’s reckoning, the interior a blur of teak and mahogany, the lush garden scent of Earl Grey. He murmurs instructions to uniformed pilots who don’t blink at the blood and the bruises, and sweeps her up when she stumbles, graceless in the aftershock. She wraps her arms around his neck, narrows her focus to the tense flare of muscle between his cheekbone and jaw. Something wet trickles onto his collar, she’s crying, a flood she can’t stop, must stop, she never cries, this is twice in one day, and she can’t bare her throat to him, not to him. 

“Look at me, Sophie. Look at me. You’re safe, I’m taking you home.” 

Safe, in the arms of the man who killed her ex-lover (possibly, probably, with his own strong and artful hands), but Sophie can feel the truth of it. Safe, and she is, she is, because this man, this tailored paladin, has marked her as one of his own. It’s there in his eyes, the kindred she’d forsworn, and she reclaims it with a vengeance, savors the familiar burn. 

He elbows a bathroom door, lowers her to the floor in a glide against his thighs, strips her without comment of sandals, jeans, the ruin of a blouse she’d buttoned that morning in a London light years distant. Lifts her clad only in ivory lace to perch like a child on black marble, runs cool water from a silver tap and bathes her face, her knees, her hands. The palm of her left still bleeds, and she wonders if Jaimie’s still lies on the sidewalk, if his wife knows, if the stain on the concrete has dried. 

She meets his gaze, finds the rage he’s leashed to touch her in the cording of his neck, the long tendons of his fingers – rage muted by mercenary precision as he sheds his jacket, rolls the sleeves of his stained white shirt. 

“You know who did this. Make them pay.”

He laughs, a black-water echo from that alley beside the Thames, but there’s something of sorrow in it, for some precious thing they’ve both lost. 

“Darling, you really should know better. The bodies are already cold.” 

He kisses her then, hard and hungry, and she knows he studies the mirror behind her, the sculpture their bodies make. She makes the kiss hers, softens his mouth and drinks his fury until his eyes drift shut and the pulse slows at his throat, fluttering beneath her fingers. Sophie understands contracts, the filigree of bindings and loopholes - but this, their unspoken covenant, is written in soothsayer’s ink. No middle ground, not for him, not for her. 

Pulling away, he retrieves a medical kit from beneath the sink without losing his hold on her eyes. 

“This will sting.” 

It does, but he soothes the antiseptic’s bite with his breath, smooths salve on her knees and binds her hand in gauze. He helps her into her jeans, leaves the room and returns with a shirt. One of his own, a twin to the one he’s now wearing – it nearly reaches her knees when he does up the buttons, and somehow that’s unbearably funny. Sophie doesn’t giggle, ever, but there’s no other word for the sound lifting free of her throat. 

“We look like an advert for online dating. A matched pair.” 

“That we are, Sophie. That we are. You need tea.” 

“I want scotch.”

Smoky peat and sweet detachment, Islay’s amber magic - she falls asleep with the Laphroaig at her elbow, wakes curled into his side at Heathrow. He’s immaculate again, silver cashmere to her blue jeans and bandages, and the car that stands on the tarmac is alabaster sleek. This is a man who takes pleasure in possessions, in their choosing, in their care. Sophie has never belonged to any man, and isn’t about to start now. She doesn’t believe that’s what he wants, but denying him whatever that might be is a dying breath gambit, a mortal mistake. Sophie has chosen, and she’s prepared to pay the toll. 

He opens the passenger door, wakens the engine with a push of a button, buckles her into red leather and folds long legs beneath the wheel. The low growl becomes a roar when he flicks a switch in the console between them, his grin an errant schoolboy’s, an invitation to shared delight. Sophie suspects he seldom shares anything, and she powers down her window, manages a watery grin of her own. 

“Brace yourself, darling.” 

He doesn’t take her home. 

The Great South-West Road again, and again the M4, stalking and dodging the road’s lesser beasts – Sophie remembers the first time she rode beside him, her fear, winter’s chill, his heat. The sun is setting when they reach the A4 and slip round the brooding Thames, slow to an impatient crawl on Old Brompton, slink through narrow pristine streets. A garage door opens and the car rolls to a stop inside. Beneath a pocket haven mews house built of age-mellowed London stock brick. In Chelsea. 

Not the habitat Sophie had imagined for a predator of the billionaire wild. 

His arm circles her waist and he keys in code to a steel plated entrance, ushers her into a book lined study – books with touch-worn covers, arranged with care, well and truly read. They move through earth tones, bronze and taupe and grey, the last of this day’s light flowing over minimal lines and rich fabrics and the scent of rooms suspended in time. He doesn’t live here, not really, but the paintings and the scattered collection of luminous Chinese jade speak of ownership, one man’s discerning taste. Dragons. He collects dragons. French windows stretch floor to ceiling, ever so subtly barred and wired for a system he rearms at each door. 

She knows he must own other houses, the kind meant to showcase wealth, host the preening theater of power. This place is…his, a sanctuary where he lowers the mask. 

A rare and deadly thing, to see the executioner’s naked face. 

Logic says she should still fear him, but she can’t find fear in its usual haunts, the back of her throat, the chinks of her ribs. Bruises throb at her knees as they climb an oak planked staircase and he guides her into a bedroom, presses cool black silk into her hands. 

“Come down when you’ve changed.” 

She turns to face him, finds him gone. 

There are calls she should make, questions that need answers. Sophie can hear his voice from downstairs but can’t make out the words, sharp-edged and staccato, commands for a cabal of cold killing purpose. She has orders of her own to give, people waiting, but she’s mired in the moment, bound to the man who waits below. 

Another turning, ad sinistram, the inevitable path to the left, and she considers whether her neighbor will take in her cat, if Ozymandias saw this coming. 

The robe he’s given her smells like his skin, trails her ankles and the stairs as she descends to find him in the kitchen. A panther prowling marble and stainless steel, providing her a bowl of Tom Kha Gai, a silver spoon, and a concise summation of her activities since last they met at Heathrow. 

She has no idea how he managed the soup, but his omniscience comes as no surprise. He watches, silent and pacing, as she follows every lithe movement. He waits until she’s finished to pause at her chair, loom over her, eyes the color of his jade in the clear kitchen light. They hold the sheen of anger, but she thinks it might not be for her.

“I warned you, Sophie, that lack of restraint would be your undoing. You should have been satisfied with your efforts at rescue, left the men behind it alone, and yet I find you poking at wasp’s nests.” He takes the bowl, the spoon, her jaw in a grip just short of bruising. 

Then again, perhaps she’s wrong. 

Sophie had sworn off killing but hadn’t been able to resist syphoning the slave trade’s profits to aid its victims, thought she’d be safe behind cyber curtains, but he knows. They know, and Jamie is dead. 

“I find you in the midst of my business affairs, and now the wasps are circling me. They know I came to Manchester. For you.” 

“Your business affairs? You filthy bastard, you’re...” 

She’s out of her chair, half out of her mind, and feels his hold on her tighten. 

“No. Not a trafficker. Some of my associates do not share my discerning taste. And they, my darling, are threatening to swarm. They see you as a pressure point, a way to take me down.” 

His fingers slip lower to circle her neck, just enough pressure to restrict blood flow, breathing, to lock her gaze on eyes blue as heaven’s open gate. Just enough to coil heat in her belly, and Sophie wonders just when it was she fell so in love with death. 

“So swat them,” she says, “it’s what one does with wasps.” 

The laughter starts cold, a triangle of teeth and the rumble of glaciers rich and low in his chest. Then his mouth finds hers and he’s grinning into the kiss, pulling her to her feet, cupping her breast beneath his robe, soothing her throat with the brush of his tongue, warm and wet. Warmth in his eyes, for her, and regret. Sophie could drown there, though she’d struggle (not at first) – nothing in the universe is more dangerous than death falling in love with you. 

“Wasps don’t lose their sting when you crush them, Sophie, but I’ve set things in motion. Tomorrow should see us both free of…pestilence.” 

He kisses her again, carefully, finishing with a flick of his tongue. 

“Up, darling. You need a bath – you taste of vengeance and Manchester dust.” 

He pulls off the robe on the landing, leads her naked into a slate tiled bath and runs water into the over-sized tub. Pale blue light laps the baseboards and she’s already waterborne, remembering that otherworld in the back of his car, the feel of him inside her. Steam bathes her face as it rises, wreathes them both like a breath exhaled while she kisses him, strips him bare. Snowdrifts of fabric, the snake’s hiss of his belt, and then he’s lifting her, lowering her down, his cock hard against her flank. 

“Tomorrow…” she says. 

“Tonight. I’ll wash the blood from your hair, take you to my bed. We’ll fuck. I do love fucking you, Sophie. We’ll sleep.” 

His hands wrap her throat, ghost her shoulders, lift her breasts to the heat of his mouth. Long fingers glide between her thighs, open her to the water’s caress and plunge deep, deeper still and he flicks his thumb, just once, once and she comes for him lost in blue, in wisps of sadness, in his eyes. 

“Why did you find me in Manchester, Tom? What am I, to you?” When she can speak again, when she sees his guard slip, sees him searching her face for portents. 

“More than I can afford.” His mouth on hers, her lips, her throat. “But…power, wealth – they seldom to belong to men who fear the fall of the cards.”

“Gambling, throwing down with the devil? Is that who you are, what you are, why you kill?” 

“I’ve already told you I’m an atheist, darling – no pantheon, no devil. I do it for England.” 

Sophie wonders if there’s a distillation of truth in that, if he’s drunk enough of the angel’s share to believe. 

He cups the back of her neck when he kisses her again, dips her backwards, follows her under to wet her hair and surfaces grinning, shaking droplets from his face. The blood tinting the water isn’t hers ( _Jamie, that sidewalk, the fire_ ) but he won’t let her think, makes her come once more with his left hand, unraveling tangled strands with his right. Not gentle, not this time, each tug at her scalp electric, his fingers relentless – it ends with the taste of tears on her tongue, the red trail of her nails on his chest. 

When she steps from the bath she’s weightless, wobbly, and he steadies her as he towels her dry, replaces her dampened bandage. He takes her to bed, a vast harbor of brocade and sateen, as promised. Sophie believes he’s a man who always keeps his word once given. She isn’t certain just what it is that she has given him, but she’ll play her last cards to find out. 

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back – everyone always forgets that last bit. 

Restraint, gentleness, lean muscle suspended above her, the ache of soft touch - he takes his time until she steals it. A knee between his thighs, a shove to his shoulder and she’s poised above him, teeth at his throat. Sophie licks her way down as he shudders, his flesh twitching beneath her tongue. He likes control, more than he’s shown her (a hot rain of imagery, blindfolds, bound wrists). Maybe someday, if they have one, she’ll allow him to surrender all that he is, allow herself to yield. Not tonight. 

Tonight, she takes him in her mouth to hear him moan, feel him fist his hands in the wet vines of her hair. Tastes the paradox of salt and the sweet pulse of blood, silky skin and hard need, takes him until she feels him tighten and releases his cock, rises up, not yet, not yet. Panting, half-lidded, sweat slick and trembling, he’s glorious, helpless, lethal. 

“ _Now._ ” 

A warning, and Sophie won’t test his patience further though he’s a deathly patient man. 

She sinks down to take him inside her and his hands span her waist, wrench her body in an awkward spin until her back molds to his chest. Wolf’s teeth at her shoulder, hot breath at her neck, exquisite torture and he’s almost too deep, the angle almost too painful. 

“Move with me, Sophie…need you…”

Almost a plea, his voice shredded silk, and it hurts and it’s a lie and the most honest thing she’s ever known. Rising up, crashing down, her thighs burn, her hips throb beneath his shaking fingers and she’s crying when she comes, tears unbidden for darkling ghosts, for him. He lifts her up, muscles cording in his forearms, thrusts hard twice more, three times, and this time his teeth draw blood. Pain, the hot pulse of it echoing his keening release, the rasp of her name in his throat.

Falling forward, buckling beneath him, weightless, drifting. His tongue laps where she bleeds, too much blood this day, too much, but London’s fog has found her and wrapped her tight in mercy. 

“Shhhh. Sleep.” The words are too tender, too warm to be his. Warm, he’s covered them both, folded her into his heartbeat, and Sophie is falling, sinking, gone. 

She wakes to a darkness so complete she cannot see his face, to his body above her and his breath on her skin, the press of his cock at her belly. 

“Sophie,” he says, and she shifts her hips, opens herself takes him in. 

Slow, splayed out beneath him and he moves so carefully - she finds a scar her fingertips remember, lacing his fourth rib with the fifth and far too close to his heart. Scent, his sweat and sandalwood and her own incense tang, the flex of tendon and muscle, the dense curvature of bone. Sound, skin on skin, the whisper of sheets, the words she drinks from his mouth. Making love, or something so close she can feel their bodies straining for it, the mystery, the question. 

Completion, hers in the heat of concentric ripples, his taking him unexpected, his body rigid and driving deep, gut-punched and gasping. 

After, cheek against his chest to feel the thrum of his story, she listens. He tells her of a place in Turkey, home to roses burning with a red so deep the human eye perceives it as black. 

“They built a dam, flooded the village of Halfeti, and the people had to relocate. They brought their roses with them, but only the strongest survived.” He shifts beneath her, lifts her palm and kisses it, lips parted. 

“Black roses, Sophie, and only one place in this world where they grow.” 

He drives her home the next morning in a London summer downpour, climbs the steps beside her and shakes raindrops from a black Fox umbrella. Distant, beneath public school armor and the finest British tailoring, masking the dragon collector and the man who had slept in her arms. Ozymandius takes his measure from atop the mantle, turns a sly golden shoulder when Tom cups her chin and kisses her goodbye. 

Sophie is stripped too bare for pretense, demands the night before from his tongue, and for a moment he’s willing to join her there, raw and sweet and then he’s gone. 

**********

Sophie picks up the pieces, does what she must to find her way back. Whatever he has done to ensure her safety has proven both bloodless and effective – no black cars or bodies litter Leathermarket’s pavement, and her interests, both aboveboard and clandestine, continue to thrive unchecked. 

Four weeks later she’s still restless, wandering, and the mark of his teeth has faded from her skin. She dreams of roaring through London’s labyrinth in his elegant moonraker’s car, the driver’s seat empty, the night sky awash with stars. She dreams of his body, the look in his eyes on a Chelsea morning just beyond her reach. . Middle ground is no longer an option and she’s lost the arrogance to believe in maps, finds herself talking nonsense to her disdainful marmalade cat. She isn’t that kind of girl, that kind of fool – “angel,” he’d called her, and perhaps it’s time to fall. Sophie looks backward to familiar ground, forsakes the pavement for the zephyrs of chance. Her old friends, the virtual jungle’s hyenas, welcome her with open arms. 

Five weeks later and his death is a front page link in the Telegraph, the Times. 

A power broker enigma, his private jet lost to the Atlantic, no dispatch from the pilots, no warning, no hope of recovery. Suspicion of foul play at the shadow hands of various rivals, but no proof. Heady fodder for a tabloid week, and then nothing, no further word. No pirates, and Sophie knows he would have preferred their guns to helpless freefall, the sea’s indifferent embrace. 

She turns off her phone, gets into her car, and hits the A23 in a haze of spilling tears – her unfamiliar hot blood connection to living (and dying) demands libations, it seems, for absent gods. Sunset is hours gone when she reaches Brighton, the seaside cottage bequeathed by an aunt who hadn’t loved her. Sophie had visited once before, locked the door on chintz and Staffordshire and never thought of coming back. She bypasses the house, finds he beach trail, overgrown and treacherous in the starless dark. Sophie stumbles, falls twice to bruise her knees and open a gash in her palm (the left), but there’s nothing of the night more dangerous than the bared white teeth of her heart. 

He hadn’t been hers, she hadn’t been his. This hollow rage, this grief – she owes him none of that. But…the ocean has taken everything that she loved, and somehow in the taking lies the possibility she might have loved him. Possibility, the next time, and the next – the ocean has taken that.

Sophie wades into the greedy water and screams till her throat is raw. 

Eight weeks, and her concierge brings a package to her door. It’s seven a.m., her coffee still too hot for drinking, and Sophie has never been a creature of the light. Months later, when she resurrects the moment, it’s scored by London’s irritable morning music breaching the open terrace doors, scented by Gris Montaigne ( _“it suits you”_ ) and espresso, focused on the promise of a nameless florist’s box. 

Sophie wasn’t feeling the promise then, wasn’t feeling much of anything at all. From the air, from lofty heights, the world drains of all color save numb blues and greens. The heavens are cold, so cold, and she’s pushed her friends away, abandoned Scotch because it tastes of him, abandoned herself to numbers and targets. He has no right to haunt her so, this man she’d only met twice. 

At eight o’clock she vows to bury him, and opens the plain white lid. 

A bed of tissue the color of desert sand cradles two roses. The offering is roadside garden ordinary, thick with thorns, the sparse leaves beginning to wilt. Sophie separates their twining stems and lifts one up, breathes the phantom scent of river water, the base notes of perfumed dust.

The velvet petals shimmer an unearthly dried-blood black. 

She’s never seen his handwriting, doesn’t recognize the spiky script on the card she pricks her finger to uncover. One word, kindling fury (he would pay dear for those eight weeks) and the spring-melt warmth of hope. 

_Come._

She packs her bags and buys a one-way ticket from Gatwick to Antalya. Ozymandias turns his back when she leaves him with her neighbor – he may never forgive her, but a cat enjoying the grace of his seventh or eighth life is well-versed in the art of forgetting. 

Sophie fastens her seatbelt in the first class aisle seat (she always books the aisle seat), and this time there’s no businessman to block her view of the window’s circle. London’s spider web streets, the snakeskin Thames, her past, her pain become a jetstream blur as the sun sets and the plane dips in an east bound curve. She’s replaced her ceramic stilettos (a wise traveler is always well armed), snug in the seams of her Ferragamo boots beneath a dress as blue as his eyes. 

She may not find him in Halfeti, doesn't know what she might learn there, about him, about herself. A black rose holds many meanings: mourning, rebirth, tragic love, resistance if you’re Irish. She isn’t, but if life’s sharks have taught her how to swim, it took a man with the devil’s own laugh to teach Sophie she could fly. Her wings are feathered with razor blades, the strength of innocence lost, and fire. 

She hopes that he was speaking his truth when he’d told her he wanted to burn. 

Sophie grins, opens her gates to all things impossible, and soars. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and discussion are most welcome :-) Thanks for reading.


End file.
